


Empty House

by Filigree



Series: Empty House [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Darkfic, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, Loki procrastinates, M/M, No Sex, Not compliant with Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World Spoilers, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited Love, funerary practices, mascara alert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:56:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigree/pseuds/Filigree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki buys a blanket and waits too long to give it away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty House

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Make A Weapon Of Our Hate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/539083) by [icarus_chained](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained). 



> Partially inspired by icarus_chained's short, brutal, and lovely 'Make A Weapon of Our Hate'. But my version of Loki is much more of a wimp than hers.
> 
> My original fic readers would *kill* me if I did things like this to my characters, so when dark moods like this overtake me, I mess up other people's characters instead. Feel free to yell at me.
> 
> Seriously, this thing is dark and sad. Do not read if grief and death might trigger you.

Dazzled by fiery noon sunlight, Loki Silvertongue ducked under the market stall’s canvas roof. In the shade he saw a flash of red, of metallic gold, of glinting blue-white gems. His breath puffed out from under his hood in a small cloud of cold vapor. He spun, white coat flaring at the hems, his spear at the ready. Then relaxed, as the two Fire Giant stall-keepers goggled down at him.

“Little traveler, are you well?”

“False alarm,” said Loki, laughing at himself. Then looked again at the long swath of fabric draped over a display stand. The cloth had clearly seen better days. “What is that, and from what Realm did it come?”

He had nearly forgotten about Midgardr. Frigga’s death had dissolved his last anchor to Asgardr. His last obligation to Thor, the price of exile and freedom, had been to cast down that rabid Dark Elf. Since then, Loki had neither breathed Aesir air nor worn Aesir form. He loathed his birth shape slightly less now. It was pleasant to travel as just another jötunn, albeit a hornless runt wrapped up in a white spellcoat to ward off heat and light. 

He’d come several times before to this ramshackle market town on the edge of a Muspell desert, for magical ingredients unknown on Jotunheimr. No one challenged him twice, once he made plain his skill at sorcery. Better yet, no one cared. Outside Asgardr, he was no less and no more than Silvertongue.

“It is Vanir work, little traveler, old and costly.” 

Loki saw red and deeper carmine wool woven in jagged patterns accented with angular networks of gold-wrapped silk thread. More gold framed the round central medallion three handspans across, its blue-white silk weave threaded with flat-cut, pale sapphires approximating another jagged motif. Not precisely like, no. But close enough that some dreamy Vanir weaver had doubtless Seen True.

Stark. Iron Man. Avenger. Anthony. Tony, Loki thought, suddenly caught by the memory of a fragile mortal throat in his grip. A pair of laughing, honey-brown mortal eyes. Banter and battle, equally joyous. A brilliant mind ever poised on the knife-edge of malice and self-destructive madness, and perfectly aware of it. Counterpart. Otherself. A whisper of possibility Loki had set aside then, and refused to consider since.

“It is moth-eaten and stained with Norns-know-what,” said Loki, startled to find himself in the opening bids for a shabby old blanket that appeared to bear the colors and blue-star sigil of Midgardr’s Prince of Iron.

Iron Man had been mortal. How many years had it been? Time ran differently across the many Realms. No doubt the valiant little fool was ancient now, or more likely dust. 

Loki won the blanket with slightly more cost than he’d wanted, because the stall-keepers had seen his first reaction. He achieved his other goals, then considered home. 

But there were Vanir runes in gold thread along the medallion’s border.

#

Translated, they gave him a family surname. 

Loki teleported to the capital of Vanaheimr, presented himself honestly as but a curious traveler to the guardians therein. He’d forgotten the ease of Vanir life: their love of art, learning, and pleasure. Their scorn for violence. The time he could have settled here was long past, but the land itself gave him soothing reminders of Frigga. Eventually, he found a gentle valley of long grass and soft-fleeced sheep, and a sprawling workshop on a terraced hillside.

“I’m sorry, young sir,” said the Vanir matron, touching the blanket laid out reverently on the long table in front of them. “I can tell you little of this cloth. My grandmother wove it almost six hundred years ago, near the end of her life. She frequently scried for inspirations in a spring nearby. What is your interest?”

“Frost Giants love color and gold,” said Loki, shrugging. “And it reminds me of someone I once knew. Is – is the spring off limits to strangers? I have a little seidr, myself. Maybe enough to catch a whisper of her vision?”

The matron gave him a long, level stare more sympathy than challenge. “If someone comes to this valley with a tattered shroud of my kinswoman’s making, and sees the value in it, then he is no stranger. Go, Silvertongue. While you are there, I will repair the cloth for you.”

“I can offer you gold –”

She shook her head. “This piece was never used, so far as I know. It was sent as war-tribute to Asgardr. How it ended in Muspell hands, I do not know. But it has found a better home with you.”

He followed her directions, feeling mellow and uneasy at once. She called the cloth a shroud.

The spring was set into the opposite hillside in a fall of pale green ferns. Loki brushed the ferns aside, revealing a stone-rimmed pool no wider than his armspan as a child. He knelt by the dark water. He whispered, “What did you see, shroud-maker? What made you craft the colors and symbol of Anthony Stark long before his birth?”

Whatever magic had once trickled through the spring, it had flaunted itself only to the weaver. Or Loki was unworthy. The water remained dark and clear, even when he sank his blue hand in up to the wrist. The spring took the coolness from his skin, and returned it in a slow pulse of sleepy life. When he drank, no visions came, only the taste of fern-sap and dissolved minerals. The water soothed his tight throat and itching eyes. 

On the hike back to the workshop, Loki felt a strange, taut calm. Not serenity. More a sense of waiting, for something he had not planned and could not control.

The stained, ripped rag he’d left was not the glorious thing he saw displayed under three crystal and gold lanterns. More than one seidr-weaver had reworked it during the afternoon, he thought, as he saw perhaps ten of the family smiling at him from the warm gloom beyond the lamps.

Wool, silk, gold, and sapphires. All cleaned, fibers restored to luster and strength, metal burnished, cracked or lost gems replaced, warp and weft tightened to a heavy soft nap under his trembling blue fingers.

“Oh,” he said.

“Something of your heart is in this?” asked the matron. 

“Yes.” He could not, at that moment, say more.

“Share our evening feast, Silvertongue. Lodge here tonight, and make your journey home in the morn.” 

When he looked at her and her kin, he saw only welcome. He thawed enough that eve to share some gently-bawdy stories of Thor’s old misadventures, though not enough to shift to his Aesir form. It felt wrong, since the matron had met him as jötunn, and did not seem to be wary of him.

When he retired to a tiny guest room later, he opened the door on low lamplight, and a glimmer of scarlet, gold, and fierce pale blue. He fell asleep with soft red folds clenched in his hands, and under his cheek.

#

Home was a high half-round valley cut into black mountains, glacial melt sending a green-white trickle of braided streams down to a hanging marsh. Flat steps of broken slate led up to a stone house partially built into a cave, or down to a small lawn of lichens and stubborn tiny plants. Bronze-blue reeds grew alongside the marsh’s outflow waterfall, their stems jutting over another precipitous drop five thousand feet to the large vale below. 

A seidrmadr’s house, or a hermit’s.

Loki almost never bothered to use the narrow road hammered into the lower cliff, so he was startled only a few days after his return from Vanaheimr. He heard heavy footsteps. Grumbling jötunn voices on the path. 

He swept his white spellcoat over his simple black leather trews, and folded the hood just far enough back to show the royal markings on his forehead. Then he and his spear waited at the door to his house, for the first of the towering, jagged-horned, blue-skinned travelers to appear at the top of the path.

“Loki,” said Helblindi, wheezing a little, and then: “Brother.”

The Jötnar King’s retinue was banished to the lawn. Inside his house, Loki cautiously toasted this stranger-kin with some Vanir mead, then asked bluntly, “I sought permission to settle here. Is that revoked? Do they still call me ‘kinkiller’ down in Utgardr?”

“What? No, little brother. We heal. We trade with other Realms. Some wonder that you are not at my side, with your knowledge and your travels. You do not even accept spellwork for money or barter. Why do you live alone up here, in the teeth of storms?”

Because the thunder lulls me to sleep, Loki almost said aloud. “This place suits me, for now. I have learned to love it.”

The King’s harsh face crinkled in a serrated grin, as he poked at Loki’s shoulder. “And your blue skin and your princely ridges?”

“Somewhat.”

“Well, you are a King’s kinsman. And though small for our race, and hornless, you are considered comely to otherworld eyes. I have heirs of my own, Silvertongue, but I should like to see your sorcery and your looks passed on to –”

“No,” said Loki, easing away from the almost-familiar heavy hand on his shoulder. “No more mates, and no more children. It would not be fair.” He looked up, so that Helblindi could not possibly miss what shone out of Loki’s blood-red eyes, the patched over anguish and barely healed madness. 

“Even if we foster out the children?”

“Certainly not!” snapped Loki. “Would you let a mad, defective animal breed, then send its whelps for unsuspecting folk to rear?”

“You are not defective. We have told you – you were left in the temple as part of a ritual which Odin interrupted. And if Asgardr twisted you, Jotunheimr is healing you.”

“Yes, my King.”

“Then why in the name of Ymir do you balk? Why do you hide? Are you – wait, are you pining for someone? Bring ‘em here, jötunn or not, and I’ll adopt them on the spot. I only want to see you happy.”

Thor had said as much. Loki thought of red and gold. Of his cowardly refusal to visit Midgardr again. “Some wounds cannot be healed. Some loves are lost before they are truly known. Is there aught else I may do for you, my King?”

Later, when the King and his entourage were far down the lower path, Loki shut his front door behind a barrage of spells, and huddled beside his unlit hearth. If he rocked back and forth, wrapped in red and gold and ice-blue fabric, there was no one else to comment. 

He wanted to be in Midgardr, on a tower roof in that impossible, infuriating city, bantering half-ominously with that impossible, infuriating mortal man. But he did not want to be Aesir, either. And he wondered how much poison Thor and his cronies might have spewed, how badly Tony Stark would react to a Frost Giant sorcerer on his roof. How he might laugh at Loki in Aesir form, knowing the truth.

Loki did not go to Midgardr.

#

More time passed. He calmed again, though he did not travel so widely across the Realms, and even fewer travelers braved the path to his house on the mountain. Macabre as it was, the shroud was his bed-cover most nights, more soothing than the sound of distant thunder.

In the nearest town down the valley, he heard rumors of war aimed at Asgardr and Midgardr. Once home, he glared at the lovely cloth on his bed.

“You would wish me there, you and Thor,” he muttered. “All that fool ever wanted was me fighting by his side, as Aesir or Avenger.” 

Loki eyed his spear, layered with complicated spells of offense, defense, concealment, control. It was a tool of war and sorcery, and he used it more as a walking staff now. As Loki Odinsson he had been one of the greatest mages in the Realms. Even as the Traitor of Asgardr, he had been enough to destroy Malekith. He was still young for his kind, Aesir or frost-kin, but he felt his power ebbing away. Unused. Unneeded. And more – he was glad of it. His magic had made him only a tool, a prize, and an outcast. So be it, he was done with that, too. 

It would take him seven days to break his spear, and with it the largest part of his stored magic. 

On the third day, a storm wreathed the mountaintops and veiled the lower valley, wrapping Loki’s home between two chaotic bands of gray cloud. 

At noon on the fourth day a tumult that was not thunder shook the mountains. Fireballs pummeled the slopes, one or two small ones crashing into the lichen lawn. Swearing in several languages, Loki grabbed his spear and went to check the nearest smoking debris.

He saw scorched metal. Something clear and manifestly harder than glass. Reeking plastic. It appeared to be a door-hatch of some kind. The other visible debris looked more solid, as if ripped from bulkheads. A ship, Loki thought. Not like the Chitauri vessels, but just as clearly crafted for the mediums of space and Void.

Another fireball lit the clouds overhead. Loki glanced up just in time to see a flash of metallic red, gold, and fierce blue-white light –

He ran toward the impact point before he could even think, swinging the spear in a flat arc and pushing out a hundred-foot-high layer of vastly thickened air. The tumbling figure met resistance and slowed. Not enough. Loki exerted himself more, feeling the ragged edge of strain much too soon. The figure fell with a barely-audible thump into the lichen. Loki banished his air-cushion and lunged forward.

On the ground, the armored figure still moved, writhing in a terrible, obvious, familiar way. The dance of agony, Thanos had once called it. Dark blood spread below the armor, into the brown-green lichen and patches of snow. The blue-white star set into the armor’s chest burned so bright it cast glaring light and black shadows.

Please, Norns, let this be someone else using his armor.

Loki reached the thrashing figure, dropped his spear, held the armored shoulder, and pried away the faceplate.

Oh, Norns. The face was familiar, and it held an expression that Loki had last wished on Malekith the Dark Elf. On Stark’s face, it was simply appalling. Stark’s voice, already beyond words, cut deeper than any of Odin’s punishments.

With the clarity of the damned, Loki pushed his weakened seidr into Stark’s body. Seeing the deep gashes, torn intestines, and broken bones. The wrenched spine and shattered legs. The man was dying. Too fast for Loki to heal him, too slow for mercy. And yet, selfishly, Loki could not kill him.

He broke a connection in the mortal’s neck, silencing the overwhelming messages of pain between body and brain.

Anthony Stark sighed, settling into Loki’s hold. His sallow face calmed, his eyes cleared. His lips were already tinged blue when he coughed a little, and murmured, “Hey. Loki.” Bright red blood spattered the corner of his mouth. Then the mortal gave him a glorious smile. “I’m glad.”

“Why, you fool?”

“Here. With you. Not dying alone.” The smile turned soft and fond, reflexively lecherous even on this brink. “Blue looks good.”

“Tony, you are not dying here,” Loki snarled, trying to marshal everything he knew. Any healing, any stasis to hold back the inevitable. He began a spell to stop time, knowing it wouldn’t happen fast enough.

“’S okay, Lokes. I know.” The mortal gave another bloody cough, fought through it. “You ran. I ran. Took too long. Next time, babe, stick around. Next time, don’t be so afraid –”

A dam burst in Loki’s brain, releasing centuries of pent-up anger and despair. No. He would not accept this. Not while either of them still had breath. He bent, forehead to forehead, gaze drowning in honey-brown. Mind drowning in mind, thought entwined in images and emotions.

It had been years, but not so many as he’d thought. Tony aged, invented, built, fought, schemed, and loved with all the fierce passion Loki had noticed from the start. But a small corner of the mortal’s thought and memory had always been reserved for one subject. And in that corner, Loki found his Aesir self rebuilt as skillfully as the Vanir weavers had restored the red shroud. Just as unstable and chaotic, but set closer to the side of Light. Braver, more handsome, more compassionate, more magical. A wistful fantasy of another Avenger standing beside Thor. 

As if in a mirror, Loki saw a potential beloved recognized and lost. The ache was miniscule, set against the rest of their lives. Nor had it ever faded. Faced with death, what did the fool do? Merely shifted that half-worshiped image from cream-pale skin and green eyes, to azure and scarlet, and a familiar fall of black hair. And still called it ‘beautiful’.

There was a battle somewhere else, probably being lost because Tony Stark was not there to win it. Beyond words again, Tony asked.

Loki felt himself answer. If he was lucky, it would kill him, too.

The time-spell built too slowly. Loki held the mortal’s face in his hands, helpless as only one silent prayer was granted. He felt Tony’s heart flutter and stop in shock, before the man drowned in his own blood. That brilliant, stubborn mind began to go dark around him, less shattering than simply unraveling, like clouds after a storm. 

Loki stayed within it until there was no sense of self left. Only bodily functions struggling against the lack of oxygen and nerve impulse. If he could even raise the dead man now, the returning thing would likely not be Tony Stark, but a mindless, vicious draugr lashing out at everything in its path.

Retreat. 

Waking. 

A slack weight in his arms, and the smell of blood and death around him. The star still burned within the chest plate of Tony’s armor. Responding to something almost sentient in that glow, Loki unlatched the armor. The entire left side was so mauled and twisted it caught deep in Tony’s flesh. Loki parted the black under-suit, bitterly marveling at the unwavering star – the arc reactor, he remembered now – still holding a few tiny shards of metal away from Tony’s dead heart. 

“You want to keep fighting, star?” Loki croaked in the dialect Tony had spoken. “I can give you that.”

It did not sting him or resist, when he locked his fingers around the metal housing, twisted the way Tony’s memories had shown him, then lifted out. His shapeshifting spear made a place for the reactor at the base of the spearhead, facing up and out, broadcasting its baleful blue-white glare.

Loki felt its alien sorcery surge through the spear, melding with his seidr. The thing that had drawn him to this mortal in the first place. The power they could have shared. With this, might he have saved Tony’s life? But removing it would have doomed Tony instantly.

He looked up to see a sky still full of storms and falling debris. Were they fighting over the Frost Realm itself?

The time-spell advanced. Loki was forced to lay down the armored corpse and retreat, or find himself trapped. His spear seemed to laugh at him as it turned from tarnished bronze to dull black. He stood and summoned back all the power he’d been feeding into the mountains around him. It returned swift as lightning, as a wish, drawn by the blue star. The cold of Jotunheimr settled into him, channeling and focusing the grief he could never have borne as Aesir. 

Outside the time-spell, Loki encased the mortal’s body in ice clear and hard as diamond, ten feet thick, so predators would not reach it. He sealed his house behind a similar barrier, tied to the mountains’ seidr instead of his own. If he died, the spells should linger a few more centuries.

Then, still blood-drenched, he wrapped himself in seidr and matte black armor, and launched himself and the spear up through the clouds.

# 

The accidental portal opened to the upper skies of Midgardr, this time over a vast steaming northern vale rocked by earthquakes. Loki knew the place, which he’d studied in the lead-up to the Chitauri invasion, as a weak spot. Once the super-volcano beneath it was kindled, the Avengers’ own land might be largely destroyed. Thanos had loved the idea. Loki, irked at the waste, had set it aside as a last resort.

Someone else did not have his restraint. He didn’t recognize the armada of enemy ships, but he knew the kind of beam weapon aimed at the crust of the vale fifty miles below. Loki made certain the Avengers and their allies saw him taking on one of the flashier enemy sorties, then made for the beam’s platform ship. As he drew closer, he saw a telltale scrape on a lower support strut. A smear of red-and-gold metallic dust against the gray strut. A spray of fresh blood, too.

Strike here, Tony Stark seemed to say beyond death, this support, and this one, and the whole beam housing will fold up under pressure and slice into the platform ship. Loki dodged attackers who were not ready for him, focused the seidr pulsing in the spearhead, and slashed as he flew by. He took out the second strut a moment later. The sputtering beam swung upward, as sweet a trajectory as Tony had planned, and neatly bisected the front half of the ship before the beam housing exploded.

The ship was crippled and falling. Not good. Its impact might set off the very reaction Loki aimed against. He gathered his power again, darting down and under the plummeting wreck. Another portal, stretched the widest his seidr could bear. Where? The Void? He did not like to think of sending living souls into that abyss. Sun-fire was cleaner and surer, and Midgardr’s star would barely notice the conflagration…

He barely dodged the white lance of coronal matter that licked up from his portal, devoured the ship, and dragged the blazing remains into its gravity well. When he shut the portal, he saw a changed sky around it. Midgardr’s defenders and allies mopped up a disorganized armada. Loki saw the Helicarrier of Shield far below him in the atmosphere, and knew its powerful telescopes were trained on him.

Did they even recognize him, in this shape? They would see Tony’s star, he knew.

One did. Loki saw Thor rise to meet him, one big hand on Mjolnir, one outstretched. The blond god looked older and more tired. More of Odin in him, and yet more of Frigga’s subtle strength, too. Thor did not even blink at Loki’s unfamiliar shape, though his gaze lingered on the arc reactor set into the black spear. There was no air up here to waste on speech. Loki felt the Asgardian’s voice echo in his mind, instead.

(Loki? You returned. You fought for us? Oh, my brother! We have won this day. Thank you for completing the Man of Iron’s plan. You bear his star. Where is he? I watched the attackers reach him, and then he vanished –)

(Thor. Anthony Stark is dead. He fell wounded from this battle, and died on Jotunheimr. This was a promise to him and him alone. I must go. I will bring his body back to you.)

Thor’s grief did not look as good as Loki had once imagined it might. He’d seen too much of Thor grieving. One reason he’d gone to ground in the remote mountains of Jotunheimr. 

(Go, brother. Return soon.) Unlike Loki, Thor was already weeping.

#

Late sunlight spilled into the high valley, casting strong shadows around the footprints of predators drawn by the scent of alien blood. The ice stood inviolate around Tony’s body, and in front of Loki’s house. 

Loki raised wards around his little valley, set cressets of white magnesium ablaze for more light, and wrought a long, low, slanted tank from clear ice, its outflow aimed in a little channel leading to the marsh. He unlocked his house, brought forth the things he would need, and wondered about strong drink.

No. He was numb enough already. This was not a charge to fulfill in a warrior’s drunken rage, but a woman’s task, a lover’s task, a last gesture undertaken in kindness. And selfishness, if he was honest. He could just as easily hand this off to the Avengers and to Shield. No doubt, they would subject Tony’s flesh to their own rituals. But the man had died in Loki’s arms, and his body deserved better than the sordid aftermath of mortal death.

Later, out under the starlight beyond the torches, the marsh-waters ran dark with blood. Loki knew they’d be clear again by dawn. 

Loki sat back on his heels and regarded the clean body in the newly-cleaned tank. So many old healed scars. Too many, for a man who should have grown up a joyful maker, and nothing worse. The Vanir would have liked him. Even they, pushed to battle, became warriors to match the Asgardians. The same with this prince of Midgardr, who’d reforged himself into a weapon when he’d had nothing else left.

Now Tony’s death-wounds were sewn together with thin gold wire; where the gaps were too wide, Loki had woven a neat, tight mesh between. He’d straightened Tony’s legs and bandaged them with supple elkhide. He’d stretched more of the leather about Tony’s midsection to hide the gold-cinched wounds front and back. Nudity seemed disrespectful, so Loki went back in his house. He sought out a robe of red linen he’d found in a Vanir shop, and never worn. 

Glancing over the hearth, the lanterns, the furniture and accents gathered in his travels, Loki realized how few of them were his old preferred green. And how many were hues of red and gold-bronze, enlivening the black stone walls and floors. He suddenly wanted to burn them all, leaving nothing but charred, cold rock. 

He shut the door on lamplight, walked back down to the tank. Something howled out on the slopes beyond his wards and the white flares. Loki showed his own sharp teeth to the night, daring the scavengers to follow Tony’s blood down the waterfall. It was all the taste they’d get.

He wrapped Tony in the robe. Back in place, the arc reactor began to dim. Loki did not know if that was from renewed contact with its master’s dead flesh, or from the demands Loki had placed on it in battle. It seemed fitting to wait until the blue star burned out.

He cleaned blood and death-muck from the armor, left the terrible distorted gashes for Shield to see. He could not salvage Tony’s inner suit, and burned it in clean fire.

With his closed eyes and peaceful expression, the mortal looked almost asleep. As if he would wake and grin, should Loki ruffle his dark silver hair. A few more hours of Jotunheimr’s cold, and Tony’s faintly-golden skin might gray out, his lips turn darker blue. A cold and lovely trophy, if Loki wanted to keep him. But this was only a body, an empty house bereft of the mind Loki had loved. Keeping it was as ill-done as rebuilding it into a draugr. Loki had known sorcerers who did the latter for their pleasure, Malekith included. He would not stoop so low.

The blue star flickered and went dark.

Loki stood, still numb, and shook out the Vanir shroud. Had she Seen, that long-ago weaver? Had her grand-daughter Seen, the day he arrived with a tattered cloth?

He wrapped Tony’s body in the rich fabric, leaving the mortal’s face free. 

He opened another portal, delicately as he could, sending a tiny chunk of ice through first. In his hand, its twin mirrored an interior room of clean-lined Midgardian luxury, surely one of Tony’s fortress-palaces. The Avengers and some of their camp followers looked down, startled. Loki grinned mirthlessly to see Thor pushing them all back with spread, muscle-bound arms.

He sent the armor through first, crashing to the side, because he hated it. It had given Tony a false sense of power and invulnerability. It had killed him in the end.

For the longest moment, Loki considered simply sending Tony’s body through next. Chances were good, even after all this time, that Barton and his red assassin had weapons set aside just for Loki. He really didn’t care anymore. And Tony deserved better.

He gathered up the limp, red-wrapped bundle, cradled it close to his chest, and stepped across. Warm Midgardian air greeted him, a reminder of all he’d squandered. 

“Brother!” Thor moved forward, big hands held out to receive the terrible gift. 

This was proper, Loki thought, relinquishing his burden. Keeping Tony sheltered in arms that had cherished him. This was travesty, for not even Thor had kept Tony safe. 

“Stay,” said Thor.

“I am not your brother,” Loki said without anger or sadness. It was just a fact of fate. “I cannot stay. I came only to return him.” He spun on one foot, facing his portal home. Scanning, as he turned, the other unmoving figures around him: Barton, Romanov, the resolute Captain, Banner with the monster glimmering in green eyes, several strangers Loki guessed were new Avengers.

As Tony had always wanted him to be.

The lack of hate on their faces scorched his soul. He saw sympathy. How had any of them known? Had Tony prattled so freely, all these years? Loki could no longer give them what they thought they wanted, if ever he could. To think otherwise was a lie. And kindness, not to confirm it a lie.

So Loki said only, “Do him honor,” before he crossed back to his cold valley and his own empty house.


End file.
